This site is the blogging component for my main site Crank Astronomy (formerly "Dealing with Creationism in Astronomy"). It will provide a more interactive component for discussion of the main site content. I will also use this blog to comment on work in progress for the main site, news events, and other pseudoscience-related issues.

Monday, February 23, 2015

I find myself with an annoying backlog of posts that are almost ready, along with a bit of "writer's block" on just how to complete them satisfactorily for posting. I'm also preparing some posts related to some inquiries in my comment stream, as well as some 'behind-the-scenes' upgrades to this effort.

A major catalyst for independent re-consideration of electricity and magnetism in space came in 1950, with the publication of Immanuel Velikovsky's Worlds in Collision.

Mainstream at that time denied Electromagnetism in Space or ANY need for it.

My original response to this claim is here (ISF), but in this post I'll fill in more of the details.

I have loads of papers exploring cosmic electrical phenomena prior to the publication of Worlds in Collision in 1950, so Haig's statement is demonstrably false.

The big jump in the study of electrical phenomena in space was the advent of space flight. With the early high-altitude sub-orbital rockets like Aerobee (Wikipedia) and Viking (Wikipedia), came the prospect that we could do actual measurements of particles and fields in space. The success of the scientific community in contributing technologies for the Allied win of World War II combined with the competition of the coming Cold War made nations around the world expand their efforts to understand the space environment, especially the space near Earth, which could become the next High Frontier.

But even prior to this, researchers looked for evidence of electric and magnetic fields in space. For a number of years, the difficulty was that most of our knowledge of the space environment came via light, which meant that the most direct measurements of distant magnetic and electric fields came via the Zeeman effect (Wikipedia) and the Stark effect (Wikipedia) which affected spectral lines emitted by atoms in the respective fields.

After setting up geomagnetic observatories around the Earth in the early 1840s with Weber, Carl Gauss (Wikipedia, Phy6) recognized that most of the geomagnetic field was internal, but some components could be from electric currents high in Earth's atmosphere.

This is just a subset of the papers that I have found, in English, and read, related to electric fields in space, prior to the publication of Worlds In Collision. In this list, I've not included Birkeland or Alfven's work, though I have referenced those who made use of their work, such as Carl Stormer. This illustrates how these studies were far from limited to researchers promoted by Electric Universe supporters. I've added comments to some of these entries.

G. E. Hale. A Sun-Spot Hypothesis. Proceedings of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, 24:226–227, October 1912. doi: 10.1086/122166. Hale speculates that sunspots might have a magnetic structure similar to Birkeland's auroral model, mentioning Birkeland by name. Birkeland's work was known and appreciated by astronomers in the U.S. G.E. Hale was responsible for setting up many observatories in the U.S. (Wikipedia).

G. E. Hale. The Zeeman and Stark Effects. Proceedings of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, 26:146, June 1914. doi: 10.1086/122319. An interesting quote from the paper: "The important discovery by Stark of the effect of an electric field on radiation is one of the greatest interest to the physicist and may prove of equal value to the astronomer."

V. M. Slipher. The spectrum of Lightning. Lowell Observatory Bulletin, 3:55–58, 1917. Sometimes when the weather doesn't cooperate for your astronomical spectroscopy, serendipity may provide other observations where specialized observatory equipment can contribute. This is the same V.M. Slipher who did many of the redshifts of extragalactic nebulae which established the cosmic expansion (Wikipedia).

L. I. Schiff. A Question in General Relativity. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 25: 391–395, July 1939. Don't let the title fool you, it actually an examination of the proper way to compute the electric field created by a rotating magnetic dipole by transforming to a rotating reference frame!

L. Davis. Stellar Electromagnetic Fields. Physical Review, 72:632–633, October 1947. doi: 10.1103/Phys- Rev.72.632. Another analysis of the electric fields that would be generated by a rotating star with a magnetic field.

Note that many of these are published in astronomical publications, Astrophysical Journal, The Observatory, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, etc. so the claim by Electric Universe supporters that the astronomical community denied electric fields in space is clearly bogus.

Electric Universe (EU) advocates continue to deny this long history of the legitimate study of electric fields in space, attempting to rewrite the history. Many of these earlier works ruled out EU claims that comets/planets/stars/galaxies/whatever derive their energy output by electrical means from some still unknown generator. This makes it easy for EU advocates to claim any modern day mention of electric fields in the space science and astronomy community is evidence of their specific claims. It's rather like a psychic claiming there will be a major earthquake or major celebrity death in the coming year. It's only a surprise to people who don't pay attention to the number of large earthquakes and celebrity deaths occur every year!

Electric Universe supporters continue their track record of poor scholarship, in additional to supporting a 'theory' that has yet to generate useful predictions for planning space missions (see Challenges for Electric Universe 'Theorists'...).

Sunday, February 8, 2015

In this podcast, he covers the mis-information distributed by various individuals on the existence (or non-existence) of black holes.

General relativity has always been a rather popular topic on this blog, especially combined with Biblical geocentrism. A number of the threads receive a lot of viewing traffic, but that appears to be predominantly from 'fanboys' of some particular claim or claimant stalking the thread for traffic.

I do get a large number of comments on the topic of relativity, but many are posted under radically different topical posts which makes them more like spam. I'm reluctant to release them on the off-topic posts since some cranks subsequently insist on posting page-after-page of cut-n-pasted content in these off-topic threads. I usually just mine those comments for possible topics for future posts.

One of the recent off-topic comments in a post stated:

"It's a fallacy that GPS needs relativity. Hell, GPS doesnt even need a CLOCK on the receiver!! One simple implementation of GPS needs a few geostationary satelites that send out signals at the same time, from that the reciever can easily calculate the distance from the difference in time they arrive."

In addition to just posting their comment on a general pseudo-science thread instead of one of the many GPS threads on this blog accessible in the 'Labels' sidebar, they didn't even bother to check that I had written about the flaw in this particular claim already:Relativity Denial: The GPS 4-Satellite Solution
The short answer is the fourth satellite just provides a fourth equation that allows us to solve the system of range equations for the receiver time in addition to the three-axis coordinate position. That receiver time calculation must still include a relativistic correction.

Another recent claim from some relativity deniers stated that the "Engineering Manager for GPS" says that relativity is not needed in the GPS system and that only correction to the timing involves the gravitational potential "which has nothing at all to do with GR". I've never quite found out who the 'Engineering Manager for GPS' actually is, as those using that claim never provide a clear reference. I deal with that claim here:Relativity Denial: The Importance of Dimensional Analysis

In addition, one of the comments mentioned a relativity 'controversy' of many decades ago, involving the science philosopher Herbert Dingle (Wikipedia). I am in the process of reading many of these papers and hope to post on it in the future.

Search This Blog

About Me

I obtained my doctorate in physics and astronomy in 1994. I currently work in scientific data visualization for the media and public outreach. For more information on how I became involved in the creationism issue, visit my main page